Bribing you with your own money

It’s a well worn trick politicians of all stripes use, and often voters fall for it.

But Premier Wynne has set a new low in shamelessly trying to buy her way back into her job.

Millions were spent now on advertising government services (you may have noticed TV ads during the Olympics) and of course all of this is exempt from election spending rules as the writ has not been dropped.

Now the premier is jettisoning any attempt to balance the books by bribing you with more of your tax dollars, promising lots of new goodies that, as we now know, you will eventually have to pay for.

And as with governments of all stripes, they don’t want the bills to come due when they are in office so they extend the debt payments well beyond their term of office rather than raise taxes to pay for these goodies

Health care, dental care, pharmacare child care, elder care are all of a sudden a priority although they weren’t for the past 14 years. Well presto! They now think it’s time to spend.

Let’s just take a look at the record in health care. Remember this is the government that gave you OHIP premiums, the Ornge ambulance boondoggle, promised electronic health records, the CCAC fiasco, gave you the 14 LHINs and when they couldn’t figure out to make them work added another 85 sub-LHINs…all in addition to the Ministry of Health and 165 hospital boards in Ontario. Bureaucratic overkill. While the above was going on frontline staffing and service were being cut back. All the money was going to more bureaucracy.

Do you really think they can be trusted to spend more billions in health care effectively?

That’s just the health care file. Don’t get me going on the electricity file and the $21 billion in debt future generations will be saddled with just for the reduction in current hydro bills. And take any file and you will find the McGuinty/Wynne government has always found the solution is to add more bureaucracy and taxpayer cost.

The debt in Ontario has doubled during the Liberal term to >$310 billion, thanks mostly to mismanagement of many files.

All the economists say this is exactly not the time to run more deficits, when the economy is finally ticking over at a reasonable rate.

Ah…. but the economists aren’t trying to keep their job as Premier Wynne is trying to do.